Daily Papers

Redacting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from unstructured text is critical for ensuring data privacy in regulated domains. While earlier approaches have relied on rule-based systems and domain-specific Named Entity Recognition (NER) models, these methods fail to generalize across formats and contexts. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative, yet the effect of architectural and training choices on redaction performance remains underexplored. LLMs have demonstrated strong performance in tasks that require contextual language understanding, including the redaction of PII in free-form text. Prior work suggests that with appropriate adaptation, LLMs can become effective contextual privacy learners. However, the consequences of architectural and training choices for PII Redaction remain underexplored. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of LLMs as privacy-preserving PII Redaction systems. We evaluate a range of LLM architectures and training strategies for their effectiveness in PII Redaction. Our analysis measures redaction performance, semantic preservation, and PII leakage, and compares these outcomes against latency and computational cost. The results provide practical guidance for configuring LLM-based redactors that are accurate, efficient, and privacy-aware. To support reproducibility and real-world deployment, we release PRvL, an open-source suite of fine-tuned models, and evaluation tools for general-purpose PII Redaction. PRvL is built entirely on open-source LLMs and supports multiple inference settings for flexibility and compliance. It is designed to be easily customized for different domains and fully operable within secure, self-managed environments. This enables data owners to perform redactions without relying on third-party services or exposing sensitive content beyond their own infrastructure.

We introduce CallCenterEN, a large-scale (91,706 conversations, corresponding to 10448 audio hours), real-world English call center transcript dataset designed to support research and development in customer support and sales AI systems. This is the largest release to-date of open source call center transcript data of this kind. The dataset includes inbound and outbound calls between agents and customers, with accents from India, the Philippines and the United States. The dataset includes high-quality, PII-redacted human-readable transcriptions. All personally identifiable information (PII) has been rigorously removed to ensure compliance with global data protection laws. The audio is not included in the public release due to biometric privacy concerns. Given the scarcity of publicly available real-world call center datasets, CallCenterEN fills a critical gap in the landscape of available ASR corpora, and is released under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license for non-commercial research use.

The BigCode community, an open-scientific collaboration working on the responsible development of Large Language Models for Code (Code LLMs), introduces StarCoder and StarCoderBase: 15.5B parameter models with 8K context length, infilling capabilities and fast large-batch inference enabled by multi-query attention. StarCoderBase is trained on 1 trillion tokens sourced from The Stack, a large collection of permissively licensed GitHub repositories with inspection tools and an opt-out process. We fine-tuned StarCoderBase on 35B Python tokens, resulting in the creation of StarCoder. We perform the most comprehensive evaluation of Code LLMs to date and show that StarCoderBase outperforms every open Code LLM that supports multiple programming languages and matches or outperforms the OpenAI code-cushman-001 model. Furthermore, StarCoder outperforms every model that is fine-tuned on Python, can be prompted to achieve 40\% pass@1 on HumanEval, and still retains its performance on other programming languages. We take several important steps towards a safe open-access model release, including an improved PII redaction pipeline and a novel attribution tracing tool, and make the StarCoder models publicly available under a more commercially viable version of the Open Responsible AI Model license.

The BigCode project is an open-scientific collaboration working on the responsible development of large language models for code. This tech report describes the progress of the collaboration until December 2022, outlining the current state of the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) redaction pipeline, the experiments conducted to de-risk the model architecture, and the experiments investigating better preprocessing methods for the training data. We train 1.1B parameter models on the Java, JavaScript, and Python subsets of The Stack and evaluate them on the MultiPL-E text-to-code benchmark. We find that more aggressive filtering of near-duplicates can further boost performance and, surprisingly, that selecting files from repositories with 5+ GitHub stars deteriorates performance significantly. Our best model outperforms previous open-source multilingual code generation models (InCoder-6.7B and CodeGen-Multi-2.7B) in both left-to-right generation and infilling on the Java, JavaScript, and Python portions of MultiPL-E, despite being a substantially smaller model. All models are released under an OpenRAIL license at https://hf.co/bigcode.

Many datasets contain personally identifiable information, or PII, which poses privacy risks to individuals. PII masking is commonly used to redact personal information such as names, addresses, and phone numbers from text data. Most modern PII masking pipelines involve machine learning algorithms. However, these systems may vary in performance, such that individuals from particular demographic groups bear a higher risk for having their personal information exposed. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of three off-the-shelf PII masking systems on name detection and redaction. We generate data using names and templates from the customer service domain. We find that an open-source RoBERTa-based system shows fewer disparities than the commercial models we test. However, all systems demonstrate significant differences in error rate based on demographics. In particular, the highest error rates occurred for names associated with Black and Asian/Pacific Islander individuals.

Language Models (LMs) have been shown to leak information about training data through sentence-level membership inference and reconstruction attacks. Understanding the risk of LMs leaking Personally Identifiable Information (PII) has received less attention, which can be attributed to the false assumption that dataset curation techniques such as scrubbing are sufficient to prevent PII leakage. Scrubbing techniques reduce but do not prevent the risk of PII leakage: in practice scrubbing is imperfect and must balance the trade-off between minimizing disclosure and preserving the utility of the dataset. On the other hand, it is unclear to which extent algorithmic defenses such as differential privacy, designed to guarantee sentence- or user-level privacy, prevent PII disclosure. In this work, we introduce rigorous game-based definitions for three types of PII leakage via black-box extraction, inference, and reconstruction attacks with only API access to an LM. We empirically evaluate the attacks against GPT-2 models fine-tuned with and without defenses in three domains: case law, health care, and e-mails. Our main contributions are (i) novel attacks that can extract up to 10times more PII sequences than existing attacks, (ii) showing that sentence-level differential privacy reduces the risk of PII disclosure but still leaks about 3% of PII sequences, and (iii) a subtle connection between record-level membership inference and PII reconstruction. Code to reproduce all experiments in the paper is available at https://github.com/microsoft/analysing_pii_leakage.

Internet users have been exposing an increasing amount of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on social media. Such exposed PII can cause severe losses to the users, and informing users of their PII exposure is crucial to raise their privacy awareness and encourage them to take protective measures. To this end, advanced automatic techniques are needed. While Information Extraction (IE) techniques can be used to extract the PII automatically, Deep Learning (DL)-based IE models alleviate the need for feature engineering and further improve the efficiency. However, DL-based IE models often require large-scale labeled data for training, but PII-labeled social media posts are difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns. Also, these models rely heavily on pre-trained word embeddings, while PII in social media often varies in forms and thus has no fixed representations in pre-trained word embeddings. In this study, we propose the Deep Transfer Learning for PII Extraction (DTL-PIIE) framework to address these two limitations. DTL-PIIE transfers knowledge learned from publicly available PII data to social media to address the problem of rare PII-labeled data. Moreover, our framework leverages Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to incorporate syntactic patterns to guide PIIE without relying on pre-trained word embeddings. Evaluation against benchmark IE models indicates that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art DL-based IE models. Our framework can facilitate various applications, such as PII misuse prediction and privacy risk assessment, protecting the privacy of internet users.

Protecting Personal Identifiable Information (PII) in text data is crucial for privacy, but current PII generalization methods face challenges such as uneven data distributions and limited context awareness. To address these issues, we propose two approaches: a feature-based method using machine learning to improve performance on structured inputs, and a novel context-aware framework that considers the broader context and semantic relationships between the original text and generalized candidates. The context-aware approach employs Multilingual-BERT for text representation, functional transformations, and mean squared error scoring to evaluate candidates. Experiments on the WikiReplace dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of both methods, with the context-aware approach outperforming the feature-based one across different scales. This work contributes to advancing PII generalization techniques by highlighting the importance of feature selection, ensemble learning, and incorporating contextual information for better privacy protection in text anonymization.

Digitization of scanned Piping and Instrumentation diagrams(P&ID), widely used in manufacturing or mechanical industries such as oil and gas over several decades, has become a critical bottleneck in dynamic inventory management and creation of smart P&IDs that are compatible with the latest CAD tools. Historically, P&ID sheets have been manually generated at the design stage, before being scanned and stored as PDFs. Current digitization initiatives involve manual processing and are consequently very time consuming, labour intensive and error-prone.Thanks to advances in image processing, machine and deep learning techniques there are emerging works on P&ID digitization. However, existing solutions face several challenges owing to the variation in the scale, size and noise in the P&IDs, sheer complexity and crowdedness within drawings, domain knowledge required to interpret the drawings. This motivates our current solution called Digitize-PID which comprises of an end-to-end pipeline for detection of core components from P&IDs like pipes, symbols and textual information, followed by their association with each other and eventually, the validation and correction of output data based on inherent domain knowledge. A novel and efficient kernel-based line detection and a two-step method for detection of complex symbols based on a fine-grained deep recognition technique is presented in the paper. In addition, we have created an annotated synthetic dataset, Dataset-P&ID, of 500 P&IDs by incorporating different types of noise and complex symbols which is made available for public use (currently there exists no public P&ID dataset). We evaluate our proposed method on this synthetic dataset and a real-world anonymized private dataset of 12 P&ID sheets. Results show that Digitize-PID outperforms the existing state-of-the-art for P&ID digitization.

The rapid advancement and widespread use of large language models (LLMs) have raised significant concerns regarding the potential leakage of personally identifiable information (PII). These models are often trained on vast quantities of web-collected data, which may inadvertently include sensitive personal data. This paper presents ProPILE, a novel probing tool designed to empower data subjects, or the owners of the PII, with awareness of potential PII leakage in LLM-based services. ProPILE lets data subjects formulate prompts based on their own PII to evaluate the level of privacy intrusion in LLMs. We demonstrate its application on the OPT-1.3B model trained on the publicly available Pile dataset. We show how hypothetical data subjects may assess the likelihood of their PII being included in the Pile dataset being revealed. ProPILE can also be leveraged by LLM service providers to effectively evaluate their own levels of PII leakage with more powerful prompts specifically tuned for their in-house models. This tool represents a pioneering step towards empowering the data subjects for their awareness and control over their own data on the web.

Protecting sensitive information is crucial in today's world of Large Language Models (LLMs) and data-driven services. One common method used to preserve privacy is by using data perturbation techniques to reduce overreaching utility of (sensitive) Personal Identifiable Information (PII) data while maintaining its statistical and semantic properties. Data perturbation methods often result in significant information loss, making them impractical for use. In this paper, we propose 'Life of PII', a novel Obfuscation Transformer framework for transforming PII into faux-PII while preserving the original information, intent, and context as much as possible. Our approach includes an API to interface with the given document, a configuration-based obfuscator, and a model based on the Transformer architecture, which has shown high context preservation and performance in natural language processing tasks and LLMs. Our Transformer-based approach learns mapping between the original PII and its transformed faux-PII representation, which we call "obfuscated" data. Our experiments demonstrate that our method, called Life of PII, outperforms traditional data perturbation techniques in terms of both utility preservation and privacy protection. We show that our approach can effectively reduce utility loss while preserving the original information, offering greater flexibility in the trade-off between privacy protection and data utility. Our work provides a solution for protecting PII in various real-world applications.

Machine learning practitioners often fine-tune generative pre-trained models like GPT-3 to improve model performance at specific tasks. Previous works, however, suggest that fine-tuned machine learning models memorize and emit sensitive information from the original fine-tuning dataset. Companies such as OpenAI offer fine-tuning services for their models, but no prior work has conducted a memorization attack on any closed-source models. In this work, we simulate a privacy attack on GPT-3 using OpenAI's fine-tuning API. Our objective is to determine if personally identifiable information (PII) can be extracted from this model. We (1) explore the use of naive prompting methods on a GPT-3 fine-tuned classification model, and (2) we design a practical word generation task called Autocomplete to investigate the extent of PII memorization in fine-tuned GPT-3 within a real-world context. Our findings reveal that fine-tuning GPT3 for both tasks led to the model memorizing and disclosing critical personally identifiable information (PII) obtained from the underlying fine-tuning dataset. To encourage further research, we have made our codes and datasets publicly available on GitHub at: https://github.com/albertsun1/gpt3-pii-attacks

The widespread exchange of digital documents in various domains has resulted in abundant private information being shared. This proliferation necessitates redaction techniques to protect sensitive content and user privacy. While numerous redaction methods exist, their effectiveness varies, with some proving more robust than others. As such, the literature proposes several deanonymization techniques, raising awareness of potential privacy threats. However, while none of these methods are successful against the most effective redaction techniques, these attacks only focus on the anonymized tokens and ignore the sentence context. In this paper, we propose RedactBuster, the first deanonymization model using sentence context to perform Named Entity Recognition on reacted text. Our methodology leverages fine-tuned state-of-the-art Transformers and Deep Learning models to determine the anonymized entity types in a document. We test RedactBuster against the most effective redaction technique and evaluate it using the publicly available Text Anonymization Benchmark (TAB). Our results show accuracy values up to 0.985 regardless of the document nature or entity type. In raising awareness of this privacy issue, we propose a countermeasure we call character evasion that helps strengthen the secrecy of sensitive information. Furthermore, we make our model and testbed open-source to aid researchers and practitioners in evaluating the resilience of novel redaction techniques and enhancing document privacy.

The memorization of sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII) by large language models (LLMs) poses growing privacy risks as models scale and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. Existing efforts to study sensitive and PII data memorization and develop mitigation strategies are hampered by the absence of comprehensive, realistic, and ethically sourced datasets reflecting the diversity of sensitive information found on the web. We introduce PANORAMA - Profile-based Assemblage for Naturalistic Online Representation and Attribute Memorization Analysis, a large-scale synthetic corpus of 384,789 samples derived from 9,674 synthetic profiles designed to closely emulate the distribution, variety, and context of PII and sensitive data as it naturally occurs in online environments. Our data generation pipeline begins with the construction of internally consistent, multi-attribute human profiles using constrained selection to reflect real-world demographics such as education, health attributes, financial status, etc. Using a combination of zero-shot prompting and OpenAI o3-mini, we generate diverse content types - including wiki-style articles, social media posts, forum discussions, online reviews, comments, and marketplace listings - each embedding realistic, contextually appropriate PII and other sensitive information. We validate the utility of PANORAMA by fine-tuning the Mistral-7B model on 1x, 5x, 10x, and 25x data replication rates with a subset of data and measure PII memorization rates - revealing not only consistent increases with repetition but also variation across content types, highlighting PANORAMA's ability to model how memorization risks differ by context. Our dataset and code are publicly available, providing a much-needed resource for privacy risk assessment, model auditing, and the development of privacy-preserving LLMs.

Language models (LMs) have shown outstanding performance in text summarization including sensitive domains such as medicine and law. In these settings, it is important that personally identifying information (PII) included in the source document should not leak in the summary. Prior efforts have mostly focused on studying how LMs may inadvertently elicit PII from training data. However, to what extent LMs can provide privacy-preserving summaries given a non-private source document remains under-explored. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study across two closed- and three open-weight LMs of different sizes and families. We experiment with prompting and fine-tuning strategies for privacy-preservation across a range of summarization datasets across three domains. Our extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis including human evaluation shows that LMs often cannot prevent PII leakage on their summaries and that current widely-used metrics cannot capture context dependent privacy risks.

Language generation models have been an increasingly powerful enabler for many applications. Many such models offer free or affordable API access, which makes them potentially vulnerable to model extraction attacks through distillation. To protect intellectual property (IP) and ensure fair use of these models, various techniques such as lexical watermarking and synonym replacement have been proposed. However, these methods can be nullified by obvious countermeasures such as "synonym randomization". To address this issue, we propose GINSEW, a novel method to protect text generation models from being stolen through distillation. The key idea of our method is to inject secret signals into the probability vector of the decoding steps for each target token. We can then detect the secret message by probing a suspect model to tell if it is distilled from the protected one. Experimental results show that GINSEW can effectively identify instances of IP infringement with minimal impact on the generation quality of protected APIs. Our method demonstrates an absolute improvement of 19 to 29 points on mean average precision (mAP) in detecting suspects compared to previous methods against watermark removal attacks.

Background: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) deployment in academic medical settings raises copyright compliance concerns. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute implemented GPT4DFCI, an internal generative AI tool utilizing OpenAI models, that is approved for enterprise use in research and operations. Given (1) the exceptionally broad adoption of the tool in our organization, (2) our research mission, and (3) the shared responsibility model required to benefit from Customer Copyright Commitment in Azure OpenAI Service products, we deemed rigorous copyright compliance testing necessary. Case Description: We conducted a structured red teaming exercise in Nov. 2024, with 42 participants from academic, industry, and government institutions. Four teams attempted to extract copyrighted content from GPT4DFCI across four domains: literary works, news articles, scientific publications, and access-restricted clinical notes. Teams successfully extracted verbatim book dedications and near-exact passages through various strategies. News article extraction failed despite jailbreak attempts. Scientific article reproduction yielded only high-level summaries. Clinical note testing revealed appropriate privacy safeguards. Discussion: The successful extraction of literary content indicates potential copyrighted material presence in training data, necessitating inference-time filtering. Differential success rates across content types suggest varying protective mechanisms. The event led to implementation of a copyright-specific meta-prompt in GPT4DFCI; this mitigation has been in production since Jan. 2025. Conclusion: Systematic red teaming revealed specific vulnerabilities in generative AI copyright compliance, leading to concrete mitigation strategies. Academic medical institutions deploying generative AI should implement continuous testing protocols to ensure legal and ethical compliance.